But, absurd or not, the law must be followed. Great nations must settle their disputes by the law, even as individuals do, and there is no shame in submitting to it, for submission to the constituted authorities is the highest proof of honor and of civilization. And if England chooses to strain the law to its utmost tension, to thereby push her neutrality to the very verge of sympathy with our rebels, and manifest, by a peremptory and discourteous exercise of her rights, total want of sympathy with our efforts to suppress rebellion,--why, we must bear it. And here, leaving the letter of the law, we may appropriately say a few words of the _animus_ which has inspired the 'influential classes' in England as regards this country, during our struggle with the South. We are assured that the mass of the English people sympathize with us, and we are glad to hear it,--just as we are to know that Ireland is friendly in her disposition. But we can not refrain--and we do it with no view to words which may stir up ill-feeling--from commenting, in sorrow rather than anger, on the fact that such a majority of journalists, capitalists, yes, and the mass of inhabitants of English cities, have so unblushingly, for the mere sake of money, turned their backs on those principles of freedom of which they boasted for so many years, flouting us the while for being behind them in the race of philanthropy! It is pitiful and painful to see pride brought so low. We of the Federal Union are striving, heart and soul, to uphold our government--a government which has been a great blessing to England and to the world. Who shall say what revolutions, what tremendous disasters, would not have overtaken Great Britain had it not been for the escape-valve of emigration hither? If ever a situation appealed to the noblest sympathies of mankind, ours does. Struggling to maintain a government which has given to the poor man fuller rights and freer exercise of labor than he has ever before known on this earth; fighting heroically to uphold the best republic ever realized;--who would have dreamed that 'brave, free, honest Old England' would have regarded us coldly, sneered at our victories, grinned over our defeats? But more than this. Though not avowed as an aim, and though secondary to our first great object,--the reëstablishment of the Union and a constitutional government,--we _all_ know, and so does every Englishman, that the emancipation of the slave, to a greater or less degree, _must_ inevitably follow our success. Here comes the test of that English abolition of the blackest and fiercest stamp which has for years been avowed in Great Britain, and which has done as much as aught else towards stirring up this foul rebellion. Where be your gibes _now_, O Britannia? Where be your bitter jeers against the 'lying Constitution,' against the 'stars for the white man and the stripes for the negro,' against everything American, because America was the land of the slave?